A railroad in space?

[TheMightyFavog]

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-creators-of-the-slingatron-want-to-build-a-space-railroad

What exactly is a space railroad? Well, according to HyperV, it is Earth-based and works on a fairly straightforward product of mechanical engineering—specifically, the good old-fashioned sling.

"The Slingatron space launcher is an earth-based mechanical hypervelocity mass accelerator," reads the company's Kickstarter project description. "This patented technology can be made large enough to launch a steady stream of heavy payloads into orbit and even beyond. Conceptually, it adapts the old-fashioned sling, but uses modern engineering, materials, and computer controls to overcome the limitations of the old sling."

Essentially, the Slingatron would be an alternative to rockets. It could launch tiny satellites to "multi-ton payload containers" carrying water, fuel, building materials, for example, into orbit. The advantage to launching via a Slingatron is that it is reusable and could be launched thousands of times.

A railroad in space, eh? Someone's been watching too many bad old school animes.

[Downwinder]

1. Is it controlled by an augmented HOLMES IV system?

[csziggy]

2. !

[hunter]

3. "Rails Across the Galaxy" by Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon.

The "rails" were hyper-powerful self-focused laser beams that star trains traveled on.

Offutt passed away this past April, Lyon in 2008.

"Rails..." was published as a serial in Analog in 1982 but never picked up as a novel.

It could be an excellent Hollywood movie or the premise of a television series. I'd prefer something like that to Ender's Game. (Orson Scott Card needs to shut up and go away.)

There's too much "humans are great!" rah-rah in "Rails..." similar to Independence Day or Battlefield Earth, which Hollywood loves, but the truth is most of us humans are pretty Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush dull, venal, mean, and incurious. Nevertheless I think "Rails Across the Galaxy" could be something of a Star Trek or Firefly in the right hands.